The spring 2026 attacks on the South Pars Gas Field and the Assaluyeh Petrochemical Complex wrought immense environmental destruction, the scale of which has finally been detailed by Iranian Environmental Protection Organization chief Shina Ansari.
🔊 “During these attacks, approximately 904k tons of suspended particulate matter, 4.7k tons of organic compounds, and more than 13k tons of sulfur oxides were released,” Ansari said, speaking at the Ecocide, a Silent War Crime conference in Tehran on Sunday.
🔊 “The amount of pollution released was so great that it could have brought the metropolis of Tehran to a state where there would be no choice but to evacuate the city, but, thank God, due to the high altitude of the boundary layer, most of the pollution did not reach the air in Tehran,” she added.
The attacks also triggered the release of 1.5M tons of CO2.
🔊 “To put the scale of this event into perspective, this amount of pollution is equivalent to what 66M mature trees absorb over the course of a whole year. It’s also the equivalent of the annual carbon emissions of 80k urban households, or the use of more than 320k passenger cars, if they were suddenly released into the sky in a matter of days.”
Ansari asked how international environmental organizations can “ask a country that is under various pressures to move toward an energy transition and a low carbon economy when the results of years of national work, scientific research and national investments in carbon management are destroyed in a few days due to foreign aggression.”
Assaluyeh was just one of the areas targeted by the US and Israel that had catastrophic ecological consequences on its cities, coasts, and various natural areas.
Speaking at Sunday’s conference, Foreign Minister Araghchi demanded accountability for US-Israeli eco crimes.
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